An Ed Tech Blog Carnival 2012 : Call for submissions
Update – the carnival post can be found here
After running an Education Tech Blog Carnival last year, I put the idea on the back burner for a while. Having met up with a few bloggers over the weekend I’ve decided to have another go.
So here’s the idea:
Any blogger who is in the field of education (teacher, librarian, adviser, consultant etc) and is interested in technology writes a blog post about something related to technology in education to be part of the carnival. Please add a link to this blogpost and say it’s part of the Blog Carnival – that way your readers can find other posts in the carnival
They then email me (danny at think-bank dot com) with the URL of their blog post and a sentence to describe what it’s about. Or you can leave a comment below this blog post with the same information.
The blog post could be about a tool you’ve used, could be some tips, could be a reflection on the state of technology in education or a prediction of the future, or could be sharing good work that your pupils are producing. Anything you feel like sharing! This doesn’t have to be a major blog post, but it should be more than just a collection of links or a plug for their own product.
When I’ve added the carnival post – please amend the link in your blog post to point to that carnival post so that your readers can see the other posts taking part in the blog carnival.
The closing date for URLs is 12 Noon GMT Sunday 29th January. So you’ve got two weeks to have a think about something you want to share and write about. Which should be plenty of time, I hope.
I will then write a blog post that links to all the blog posts in the carnival and promote it on Twitter etc. Hopefully our readers will discover new blogs they hadn’t seen before. Here’s how it worked last year.
Next time, someone else can “host” it and receive all the urls.. and so on. We could do this monthly, or quarterly or whatever.
Let’s try this and see how it goes.
Update – the carnival post can be found here
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Merry Christmas from the Whiteboard Blog
It’s that time of year again! Wishing all my readers a very merry Christmas and a very happy new year.
Thanks for all your support over the past 12 months, and here’s to 2012!
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Another year of the Whiteboard Blog – Top 10 posts of 2011
The Whiteboard Blog is 4 years old today! So as it gets another year older, so it’s time for another review of some of the more popular blog posts of the past year, in case you missed them the first time around.
Here are the top 10 posts on the blog, in terms of hits, since December 2010.
- 20 Interactive Whiteboard Resources for Teachers
- Free online graph paper generator
- 11 Ideas for Music Lessons on your Interactive Whiteboard
- 8 Word Cloud Makers for Teachers
- 12 Puzzle and Quiz Creation Tools for Teachers
- Ten Twitter Tips for Teachers
- Lesson Starter Ideas for your Whiteboard
- 10 (more) Science Websites for your Interactive Whiteboard
- 10 avatar generators for profile pictures
- 10 Tools for Digital Storytelling in Class
Thanks to everyone who’s read and commented on my blog posts over the last year, and a big thanks to all of you who have retweeted and shared these posts with your followers and colleagues.
Looking forward to sharing more stuff with you over the next 12 months!
Photo Credit : Theresa Thompson
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Soft Power Education – Uganda Volunteer Project
A quick plug. The daughter of a friend of mine was raising money for the Soft Power Education charity on Thursday at the Collaborate for Change Event. I’d just like to do a quick post to raise awareness of the charity.
Soft Power Education is working with communities in Uganda to improve quality of life through education. Our funding comes from overland groups, independent travellers and sponsors from around the world. Every single penny donated to Soft Power Education goes towards refurbishing and upgrading the schools involved in the programme; the running costs of the two pre-schools; running the Amagezi Education Centre; continuing the work in Murchison; buying building materials and paying for Ugandan labour and staff.
This is the sixth year that Middlesex university student-led project has joined with Soft Power and last years trip raised £13000 which renovated two primary schools during the month they were out there. This year they hope to continue the success and are looking to raise £650 per person for Soft Power Education which will enable them to complete two more primary schools in the summer of 2012. If you are interested in sponsoring or donating towards the flight costs, or donating to the charity, then you can find out more via this page.
More information about the Soft Power Education charity can be found here : http://softpowereducation.com/
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Interactive Whiteboard Training from Think Bank
A short commecial plug. I’ve mentioned before that I am a freelance interactive whiteboard trainer – I specialise in the main on delivering training in Interactive Whiteboards (Smart/Promethean) and also on Science training for teachers and student teachers. As an interactive whiteboard trainer I regularly deliver bespoke training sessions on how to use interactive whiteboards in schools and colleges around the UK plus overseas. I’ve also deliver courses for Military and Corporate customers.
One of the things I really enjoy doing is going into universities to deliver introductory whiteboard sessions to PGCE students studying to be teachers. Institutions where I have delivered this kind of training include Kings College London and Anglia Ruskin University.
So if you are in need of interactive whiteboard training, then please get in touch.
I am an accredited Smart Masters trainer for SMART Notebook v10 and SMART meeting Pro. I am also happy to deliver training on Promethean boards – for ActivInspire, ActivPrimary and/or ActivStudio. I can also offer training on voting systems such as Smart Response, ActiVote/ActivExpression and Turning Point and also on Visualisers and their use in the classroom.
In addition I also run non-whiteboard sessions, such as blogging, podcasting, animation, digital storytelling and web 2.0 technologies. With my science hat on I can also run sessions looking in general at the use of ICT in Science, or a particular focus on datalogging.
You can find find out more on the Courses page, or check out the Think Bank website.
Here are some quotes from a recent Interactive Whiteboard training day:
“Fantastic – I learnt more today than on my PGCE”
“An extremely useful and enjoyable day”
“Very Impressed. Possibly the best course I’ve ever attended”
“Lots of really great ideas. New skills learned, others revised. Lots of thinking about application. Great”
“A great beginning to my interactive adventure”
If your school or college is in need of training, then please get in touch and we can discuss options. Get in touch via the contact form here.
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Technology Back in 1990. How Things Have Changed
As students head back to university, and the ritual that is Fresher’s Week begins again, I’m reminded that it’s now 21 years since a rather nervous student made his way up to Birmingham University to start a degree in Biological Science. And it got me thinking about how the technology available to those students starting today is a whole world away.
So yes I’ve now reached the stage when I can make students feel like I did when my father in law talks about his days feeding punch cards into computers when he was a lad.
Nobody had a computer in their room. The only computers available to us were in the Biology building. Very basic terminals which we very rarely used. I can remember having one or two sessions in there for some kind of biological statistics module. I can also remember a friend showing how he could get access to a network in America – and I remember being concerned that it must be costing a fortune to do so – looking back I think it was some JANET system.
It wasn’t until we moved out of halls of residence and into a student house that I brought my Atari ST computer up with me and used that for word processing essays. My third year dissertation and final project were all produced on that Atari ST. My girlfriend (now Mrs Nic) brought over a hulking great 186 of her stepfathers and used that. Real cutting edge tech 
(I can remember playing Lemmings, Humans and Stunt Island on it though… quality games).
This was a year before the Internet as we know it began with the launch of the World Wide Web. No Facebook, email to keep in touch with friends and family. No Skype. Twitter. News came from a newspaper or that pinnacle of technology Ceefax/Teletext. No television on-demand with iPlayer or 4OD. We had 4 channels on our telly and a slightly dodgy VHS player.
And of course, this was well before the age of the mobile phone. We used to have to queue up in the foyer of our hall of residence (Mason Hall, now sadly flattened) and use the payphones. We’d ring home, quickly give the number to ring back on and hope someone elses parents didn’t ring before yours could…. A mobile phone would have seemed like the best invention ever. A smartphone would have been unbelieveable – and an iPad would have been something out of Star Trek.
And research was carried out at the library. And pretty much only at the library.
Hmm.. this is turning into a Four Yorkshiremen sketch….
Anyway…..
A student starting university now will almost definitely have their own laptop to work on, and a mobile phone to communicate with friends and family from anywhere. The laptop will be able to access the internet and the wealth of resources that it contains. The University Library will be accessible from anywhere and a lot of the books and journals will have electronic versions.
Access to the internet is the game changer – I’m currently doing a Masters in Education through a university thats nearly a 2 hour drive away. But I have set foot on campus twice in two years. I can access nearly all the journals and books that I need via the Library system online (and for the rest I can go to a closer uni and use their library instead). Keyword searches help narrow down articles that I should read – and I can bookmark and store links for later.
Smartphones and laptops, plus the internet, have made it so much easier to communicate and research, plus to collaborate with others.
My niece is 6 years old. She has no concept of a camera that uses film. As far as she knows all cameras have a screen on the back so you can see what you’ve taken. She loves my iPad and took to it instantly – making her own animations in ToonTastic or playing Cut the Rope. The idea of the “Digital Native” who instinctively understands this stuff may be not quite as first described – but you can’t deny that this generation of kids are already growing up with this technology readily available, and they “get it”. They have “techno joy” not “techno fear” as Eddie Izzard would say. And this tech is only going to get more powerful and easy to access. Touchscreens and tablets are finally coming of age and becoming much more user-friendly.
So what’s it going to be like 21 years from now? How will todays technology develop. I’d like to think that OLED technology would mean than thin, interactive film would replace the interactive whiteboard and projector. The teacher’s tablet (iPad or whatever) would be connected to this and would display their screen and what they are doing on it. Each student would also have a tablet which would be connected to each others, and to the screen. It would be easy to collaborate with each other via these devices, and to share them on the main screen (or on each others tablets) at any time. Will we finally get decent voice activation? Gesture control is gaining ground with devices like the Kinect. Will something come out of left field and change the game, like the iPad finally did?
To me, 21 years ago doesn’t seem like that long ago. But in technology terms it’s amazing how different our students lives are when compared to our own student days.
Scary eh?
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Is joined up writing a dying art? Should we care?
This was a story from that bastion of Middle England the Daily Mail over the weekend, essentially bemoaning the fact that pupils cannot do joined up writing since they spend too long on a keyboard.
So is this a problem? The Daily Mail regularly turns the fact that “things aren’t what they used to be” into a news story – so they’re obviously going to jump on this kind of thing.
Plus there are always going to be people who are resistant to change. That any step forward is bad because we lose touch with an older way of doing things.
It’s times like this I’m reminded of these quotes (see Karl Fisch’s “What If” presentation for more) which I’ve used before.
Students today can’t prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend on their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write!
Teacher’s Conference 1703Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?
Principal’s Association 1815Ballpoint pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students use these devices and then throw them away. The American values of thrift and frugality are being discarded. Business and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries.
Federal Teachers 1950
My own handwriting is pretty awful most of the time if I’m writing in a hurry, and I have never been able to use a fountain pen properly due to the cack-handed way I hold a pen. My school spent a lot of time worrying about this – when all they needed to do was let me use a ballpoint pen… problem solved.
And this isn’t a new thing – I remember once spending ages with my parents trying to decipher the scribbles that my elderly year 4 teacher had written on my school report – turns out it said “Handwriting is still a problem”…
But thinking about how much handwriting I do these days, is it a concern? I blog, write letters, send emails, use Twitter – all via a keyboard. I text and tweet via my iPhone.
(OK – I was forced to use a fountain pen to sign my marriage licence, and it does look like a three legged ink-coated spider has crawled across the page.. and for that I do apologise to Mrs Nic)
The only time I really use a pen is for short notes on training forms when I’m jotting things down, on post-it notes when I’m leaving notes for myself, and for writing shopping lists or takeaway orders. In meetings I do tend to write notes down, but even then I am moving towards using my iPad or laptop to write these down. And most of the time, the writing is for my own use, and I can read it. If I am writing for others to read I put a little more effort in
The students we are teaching in schools are going to be pretty similar to this. Their world is one of text and keyboards – of touchscreens and SMS. It’s important that they can write legibly and use a pen – but it is important that it’s joined up? If they’re applying for jobs most of the time you have to use block capitals on forms anyway – and extended writing can be typed and attached.
The whole reason for neat writing is for the exams – and again as long as it’s neat and legible surely it’s OK that students’ writing is not joined up?
The most important thing is not how they are writing – but *what* they are writing. Is their message clear? Is the spelling correct? Can they produce a coherent argument or an entertaining story?
Yes it’s an interesting thing that joined up handwriting is no longer common. Yes it’s funny that within living memory students wrote on slates, were not allowed to use ballpoint pens or whatever. But can anyone say that they’d want to go back?
The “Digital Native” idea may be a little discredited now – but you can’t ignore the fact that the bulk of communication carried out by students today (apart from talking face to face or over the phone) is via typed text. It’s only the older generation (and Daily Mail readers who hark back to some mythical golden age somewhere in the mid 1950′s) who see this as a problem.
More power to the keyboard!
Add your thoughts in the comments.
(Image credit : ShutterSparks)
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Malware Warnings – an update
I’ve had a few messages recently that this blog was being flagged up by Google Chrome/Firefox browsers as being suspected of distributing malware. I’m aware of these issues and have been taking steps to address them.
It appears that the WordPress theme that I’ve been using had been making use of a plugin called TimThumb, and that it was this plugin that had been flagged as a security risk. I have since installed a new version of the theme that does not use TimThumb.
Today I have also been following the advice in this thread and removing a couple of other files and updating them to new versions. I’ve scanned the site via this website, and so far it’s showing that there are no risks.
This blog itself has never had any malware on it… just that it was using plugins that increased the risk of there being malware. I hope that I have managed to remove those plugins for now, and that the site will no longer be flagged as a risk.
Thanks to everyone who has been in touch over this – and apologies to any readers who were faced with the warning message.
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A short break
Apologies for the break in blogging, but I’ve been away for a few days. Had a long weekend in Venice enjoying the Italian sunshine, food and wine
Normal service will resume now that I’m back.
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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